CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE AND LITERACY PRACTICES OF YOUNG PEOPLE, ADULTS AND SENIORS IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON: CONTRIBUTIONS TO AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE SOUTH

In this article we discuss the cultural knowledge and educational practices of young people, adults and seniors linked to literacy classes of a Popular Education center at a public university in the Brazilian Amazon. The study deals specifically about cultural knowledge built in these literacy practices developed in non-school spaces, as coastal communities, hospitals, community center and asylum. The focus of debate is the contribution of the practices of popular education analyzed to epistemologies of the South, understood in view of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, as a set of epistemological interventions that challenge the denial of knowledge and / or colonized people, value the knowledge that resisted successfully and investigate the conditions of a horizontal dialogue between knowledge. The data in this article were obtained through research with qualitative approach, involving 30 teachers and students, allowing the construction of knowledge cartographies. The results show that the literacy practices analyzed, because they are based on dialogical and humanistic thought-liberating the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, help to give visibility to multiple competencies which express the social diversity of the Amazon region.